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Zimoun is a master of manipulation. Give the Swiss artist the most basic of materials—cotton balls, crinkled paper, cardboard boxes—and he’ll somehow transform them into a mesmerizing soundscape. In the case of his most recent installation, 36 Ventilators, 4.7 m3 Packing Chips, Zimoun used plastic packing peanuts, a ventilator and 36 motors to turn the Art Museum of Lugano, Switzerland, into a sonic blizzard.

The installation looks like snow and sounds like rain. “Zimoun artificially recreates the chaos of nature in a laboratory,” explain curators Guido Comis and Cristina Sonderegger. If you close your eyes, you’ll probably hear something that reminds you of a soft and steady drizzle; open them and you’ll see a swarming of insects, the churn of a foamy washing machine, or maybe exactly what it is: thousands of packing peanuts being blown about by ventilators.

Each of the windows you’re seeing is outfitted with four ventilators; and though it looks like it’s one long churning of plastic, each of those windows is actually its own separate chamber. If you listen closely enough, you can hear each component working both alone and in concert with the objects around them. The closer you get, the more complex the sound becomes. From far away, you hear a hollow twinkling as the plastic bits bounce off each other, but inch closer, and the sound takes on a before-unseen depth. The hum of the ventilators blend into the rustling of plastic to create a multi-dimensional aural experience.

It’s a particular breed of visual and acoustic trickery, mostly because Zimoun tells you exactly what you’re looking at. In many ways, knowing how Zimoun creates each piece is what makes his work so intriguing. They’re demystified, dissected, and yet, still totally baffling. As the curators put it: “Zimoun’s installation fascinates us because it reveals what is otherwise invisible: the absolute precision of the mechanisms lying behind the unpredictability of all phenomena.”

36 Ventilators, 4.7 m3 Packing Chips is at the Art Museum of Lugano, Switzerland until July 11.